In gentler days, there was honour among politicians

Fifty years ago, on April 3, 1954, Vladimir Petrov, a Soviet intelligence officer, defected in Sydney. On April 20, his wife, Evdokia, also an intelligence officer, defected in Darwin. Within six weeks of her defection an election was held. Robbed of his long-anticipated victory, the leader of the Labor Opposition, Doc Evatt, decided that the defections were part of a wicked political conspiracy orchestrated by the prime minister, Robert Menzies, and ASIO. Largely as a result of Evatt's bizarre Petrov behaviour, within a year the ALP had split.

Virtually no one any longer believes in the existence of a Petrov conspiracy. As this case has closed, new political interpretations of the affair have opened. When seen truly, what happened after the defections sheds new light on the continuities and discontinuities of Australian politics over the past 50 years.

Evatt believed that Menzies had manipulated the Petrov defections to win the May 1954 election. In fact, as now seems clear, Evatt's characterisation of Menzies' behaviour was almost the opposite of the truth.

Consider this. When Petrov defected he passed to ASIO several intelligence documents. One was a description of the habits of the Canberra press gallery, written by Evatt's press secretary Fergan O'Sullivan. A second document Petrov gave ASIO was political scuttlebutt written by the communist Rupert Lockwood. Among the sources were three members of Evatt's staff, including O'Sullivan.

The political meaning of this ought to be clear. Before the election of May 1954 Menzies had in his possession two Soviet intelligence documents with the potential to do extraordinary damage to the Labor Party. Given the strength of anti-Soviet sentiment in 1954, if this information had been released before the election an anti-Labor wave of opinion, no less powerful than John Howard achieved after Tampa in August 2001, would have been the almost inevitable result. Yet before the election neither Menzies or ASIO published this information or allowed it to be leaked.

In October 1955 when Menzies had been, yet again, accused by Evatt of unscrupulous manipulation of the Petrov defections for electoral gain, he replied in the following way. Evatt was entitled to think of him as a "crook", but he should not think of him as a "fool".

The most economical way of demonstrating how much more ruthless Australian politics has become in the past 50 years is to transpose the circumstances of 1954 to the politics of today. Imagine that a member of an al-Qaeda terrorist cell in Sydney were to defect to ASIO, and he was able to document the assistance his cell had received from three members of Mark Latham's staff. Is there anyone who believes that, in such a situation, Howard would not ensure, one way or another, that this information was released?

Last week proved, once more, that when he is cornered, our Prime Minister will fight with the ferocity of a wounded dog. Yet the point I am making here is not directed at Howard, but at the political culture of our times. If Latham were in power at the time of an al-Qaeda defection, there is no reason to believe he would act less ruthlessly than Howard if opportunity arose.

Over time the norms governing political behaviour since Petrov have imperceptibly but profoundly changed. In Chifley's and Menzies' Australia, there were limits. In Howard's and Latham's Australia, both the political class and the media accept that, in the pursuit of power, only fools will not do, in Graham Richardson's instantly famously words, "whatever it takes". A quite deep-seated political cynicism has been the result.

If the Petrov affair throws uncomfortable light upon the present, so does the present throw light upon the Petrov past. Since September 11, 2001, the anxious atmosphere of contemporary Australia uncannily resembles the Cold War of the early 1950s. The return to this atmosphere makes it easy for this generation to understand why Evatt's post-Petrov behaviour proved so devastating for his reputation and for the party he led.

Let us imagine - to continue with the earlier invention - that after the defection of an al-Qaeda cell member, Howard was to win a narrow election victory and Latham to arrive at the conviction that Howard and Dennis Richardson of ASIO had staged the defection. Imagine, further, that in a subsequent royal commission on terrorism, Latham was to make an appearance with the purpose of exposing to the world the Howard-Richardson conspiracy. Imagine, finally, that when the royal commission's report was being debated, Latham was to announce to Parliament that he had been in communication with one of Osama bin Laden's senior lieutenants who had informed him that the al-Qaeda defection was a fraud.

If all this happened, the impact on Latham and the ALP would not be difficult to predict. Yet this is, almost precisely, how Evatt behaved over Petrov between the surprise May 1954 election loss and his October 1955 reference in Parliament to the letter he had received from Stalin's foreign minister, Molotov, which had finally proven, beyond doubt, he claimed, the existence of the Petrov conspiracy.

Evatt is one of our most enigmatic tragic and figures. In Australia's political history little has been more noble than Evatt's fight against Menzies' attempted Communist Party ban; little has been more calamitous or comical than Evatt's obsessive and destructive Petrov campaign.

A new edition of Robert Manne's book The Petrov Affair is published today.